Setha M. Low Spatializing Culture: the Ethnography of Space and Place

This talk offers an in-depth analysis of “spatializing culture,” an idea that grew out of my work on the Latin American plaza (Low 2000) and Deborah Pellow’s (2002) ethnography of West African socio-spatial organization and institutions. Through subsequent research and theory-building “spatializing culture” has evolved into a multi-dimensional framework that includes social production, social construction, embodied, discursive, emotive and affective, as well as translocal approaches to space and place. By “spatialize” I mean to produce and locate—physically, historically, affectively and discursively—social relations, institutions, representations and practices in space. “Culture” in this context refers to the multiple and contingent forms of knowledge, power and symbolism that comprise human and non-human interactions; material and technological processes; and cognitive processes including thoughts, beliefs, imaginings and perceptions. Spatializing culture is useful not only as a conceptual framework; it also provides a powerful tool for uncovering social injustice and forms of exclusion. Further, as the ethnographic examples will illustrate, it can facilitate public engagement because spatial analyses offer people and their communities the means for understanding the everyday places where they live, work, shop, and socialize. Spatializing culture is not only a scholarly endeavor, but offers a basis for neighborhood activism such as opposing or modifying architectural, planning and design interventions that have the ability to destroy the architectural centers of social life, erase cultural meanings from the landscape, and restrict local participation in the built environment.